58 had its name because telegraph poles had been cut from trees near there during the eighteen-fifties.) "He loved that ranch," says his nephew, Robert Murphey. From time to time, he had a hired man or two helping him, but mostly he worked it himself. He cleared it with his own hands-whole tracts of it; Coke Ste- venson's fame as a lawyer was no greater than his fame as an axeman: he could swing a big double-bit axe with such accuracy that he could take a knot out of a log in a single stroke. He fenced the ranch himself. So hard was the Hill Country land-seldom more than a few inches of soil over limestone -that sometimes sinking a post, par- ticularly a big corner post, required dynamite ("If," Murphey says, "you can imagine having to dynamite a post- hole"), but most of the time Stevenson used a cutting bar, a heavy steel bar with a sharp edge on it, raising it above his head and slamming it down, over and over, with all his might. "He loved the land, and he never let a day pass on the ranch that he didn't do something to improve the ranch-move a rock, sink a post, whatever," recalls M ur- phey, who would later live there for some years. "He kept a bunch of old tools in his car, so if he saw something that needed doing he could do it on the spot. That doing something on the ranch every day-that was one of his prideful things." No matter how busy he might be with legal or bank affairs, he let nothing keep him away for the crucial days in a ranchman's year: goat- and sheep-shearing, and cattle- branding-his brand was "CS" on the left hip, nothing fancy. "I don't sup- pose there's been a calf on my ranch in twenty years that I haven't branded myself," he was to say. He relaxed there, too: he and his wife played with their son, Coke, Jr., and, a visitor says, "sometimes acted like they were still two kids them- selves." Once, when the South Llano was high and fast, he bet Fay that he could drive his Model T two miles right down the middle of the river to the house, did it, and, when he had won, jumped out, yelling like a boy. B UT he was to be lured into spend- ing time away from that refuge. After eight years, he was to find him- self back on the road he had decided not to take: the "public" road. In part, he came back to that road because of his wife. "Mother believed that Papa was a great, great man who should serve the people," Coke Steven- son, Jr., says. She was a leader herself; Fay Wright Stevenson was later to be called "the most beloved [ woman] that official Texas has known in a genera- tion." During the nineteen-twenties, she became active in the local branch of the Eastern Star, and then an officer of the Texas chapter of that international organization. The more time she spent in the capital, the more convinced she was that her husband could lead men on a stage much larger than the Kim- ble County Commissioners Court- and she believed, quite deeply, that he should. Much as she loved the ranch, she did not believe Coke should spend his whole life there. She began urging him to run for office again. In larger part, perhaps, he returned to that road because of his reading. He had read the practicalities of the law, and then the principles behind them; "He buried himself in . . . the history of the law," Simons wrote. Then he read history and turned more specifi- cally to government and its theories, and he "became inspired with the soundness of the principles enunciated" in two documents: the constitutions of his country and his state. He read the two constitutions-and took their words-as literally as he read his Bible, and his reverence was no less deep. "He . . . literally adopted them to the bosom of his heart." The Texas constitution of 1876, drafted by delegates (many of whom had worn the Confederate gray; several had been Confederate generals) repre- senting a people who had seen, under a decade of carpetbagger rule, the injus- tices of which government was capable, was, as T. R. Fehrenbach puts it, "an anti-government instrument." It not only bound the legislature within very tight limits but said the legislature " - - ' 1 . - ' , .l j '!f>- J ,,'., ,-: .. . .. " _ _'_"r: "" \ =-- _? .- ? 'I - ' /^" II :.t.;:J . /)( "'" """','" " X- / i 'V{. t _' " X ......., ......-. \ > / X \ ""<>-. would henceforth no longer meet every year but every other year, because, as one Texan said, "The more the damn Legislature meets, the more God- damned bills and taxes it passes!" It was no more lenient with the executive branch: the powers of the governor were reduced to a point where he was one of the weakest in America. "If future State Governments prove bur- densome and onerous, it ought not to be the fault of this Convention," one of the delegates said, and, indeed, the convention's handiwork made it, in Fehrenbach's words, "almost impossi- ble for government in Texas to be burdensome or onerous in the future." The spirit behind the constitution was the spirit of farmers and ranchers; however much they believed in educa- tion, pensions, or government services, the taxes fell on them and their land. The constitution was the embodiment of what Fehrenbach describes as "a lasting philosophy that no Legislature or Governor was to be trusted"-as a result, one analyst concludes, "every- thing possible was done to limit the power of all branches of government." It was a document more fitted to be the constitution of the older, agrarian South than of an emerging industrial state, but, as Fehrenbach says, "none of these [limitations] was controversial; they were what the people wanted." Indeed, the people wanted them still; every attempt to modify them had been voted down. The philosophy embodied in the Texas constitution dovetailed with the philosophy of the man who studied it in the light of a predawn fire in his ranch house by the South Llano; its character was his. Thrift, frugality (parsimony, in fact )-the constitution enjoined these on government as he had en- joined them on himself: the saving that had begun at the age of ten; the dili- gently kept account book; "in him, " a friend was to write, "there is an in- grained hatred of debt of all kinds." Limits on government; the devotion to individuality, to free enterprise, to in- dividual freedom-he had lived his en- tire life by those principles. And the lessons of his life-almost the only lessons, in effect, that he had had-had convinced him that the constitution was correct. He had saved, stayed out of debt, foreseen his own destiny, known what he wanted, fought, with the aid of no one but his wife, to get it-and had he not attained his